Discussion, tips, pictures, reviews and peer to peer support for current and future owners of Belquette manufactured machines, including the MOD-1 DTG machine and the Flexi-Jet set series of printers.
I recently printed 50 shirts for a swim club. The logo is in Blue on White shirts. I printed @ 360E x2passes and flashed @ 330F for 25 secs then heated @330F for 25 secs twice with a 10 sec break between heatings with light pressure. Am I doing it wrong? The customer has complained that after one wash the shirts looks faded and 'old'(their choice of word).
I have done another 50 shirt job for a different swim club using Red ink on white shirts and will be delivering these today, but i'm worried that I might get the same complaint since my method of printing was the same.
I'm using Dupont inks.
The temperature/time for curing textile ink is 350 degrees for 1 minute per ink layer...light pressure. Try changing to this procedure, then do a wash test to ensure washability.
We've actually found that using light pressure with the Dupont inks results in more ink loss after washing. If you increase your pressure to med/heavy (make sure not to scorch) it makes a big difference.
We had an orange design on a white shirt that looked faded after a wash. It actually wasn't loosing ink so much as the shirt fiber was lifting and making it look faded. You could check this because with a quick iron of the shirt to lay the fiber back down it looked much better again. (but of course that wasn't feasable to tell the customer) We switched to ring spun shirts and that helped. Also make sure that the customer is washing them correctly.
Don't be like that Dan. What's wrong with seeking opinions from whomever? Not everyone on "the other place" is a member here and vice versa. In fact the question was posted on both forums within minutes of each other. No disrespect meant but different opinions do matter to me.
We've also had weird and unexpected results with some shirts of the same batch. We had an order a few months back for 1200 shirts. Several boxes of 72 shirts each, all white, all the same shirt from the same company. Midway through the run, we started to see very significant color bleeding of the blacks and blues into our reds and yellows during prints. We also noticed that the red was laying down in a very "splotchy and uneven" way. And we were getting an overall very uneven and fuzzy print. After several hours of doing nozzle checks and cleanings and checking the whole printer over to no avail we decided to print the same design on our stock of shirts which were the same type the customer shippped to us. They printed fine. We narrowed it down to the 72 shirts in one certain box that were somehow either treated with something or where exposed to something that was causing the print to degrade. The other 8 boxes of their shirts printed fine.
Don't be like that Dan. What's wrong with seeking opinions from whomever? Not everyone on "the other place" is a member here and vice versa. In fact the question was posted on both forums within minutes of each other. No disrespect meant but different opinions do matter to me.
Not to mention that not everyone here is "allowed" to be on the "other place" because their account has been mysteriously suspended
If you are using Dupont inks they recommend 170'c which is about 338'f for 2 minutes on lights (no white ink) and 3 minutes on darks (with white ink). My guess is that your curing the shirts for too short of a time. I always suggest that customers do their own wash testing to confirm the validity of their curing process (times & temperatures).
We narrowed it down to the 72 shirts in one certain box that were somehow either treated with something or where exposed to something that was causing the print to degrade. The other 8 boxes of their shirts printed fine.
I have also seen this happen, however quite rarely. It has to do will the sizing chemicals they use to treat the cotton during manufacturing, for example, if too much softener is used in the process it can actual repel water based inks.
When ordering boxes of tees' from the same manufacturer it may help to ask if they all come from one place as they should know were they buy from.
The county of origin should be marked on the box.
Thanks Mark. That's great advice and it was one of the first things we checked. However we found that the box was divided between 2 countries as were the rest. However we bought replacements and were reimbursed for the defective shirts. This is something we will now look for if we start to see issues as should others.
I am myself facing same problem that you once had. My printing fades after a few times of washing as the fiber lifting up. I am just don't know how to deal with that. I am using a 3rd party ink (inktec heat transfer ink). Actually, the ink did loose a bit. Could you advise me on this? What do mean by "ring spun shirts". Does OEM work better than 3rd party ones?
Print fades after one wash 
